'Personal Effects' Laced With Gossip-column Intrigue

None of her magnificent jewelry is missing when police arrive to find one of her shocked proteges -- King Godwin -- standing over the body. Curiously, though, Gilda is clutching an old newspaper clipping of herself with the ''four fans'' whose careers she launched.

The mystery of Gilda's death is unraveled in Personal Effects, a fast- paced first novel by film critic Rex Reed, author of such non-fiction books as Do You Sleep in the Nude? and Valentines and Vitriol. It's told from the point of view of Hollywood gossip columnist Billy Buck, who takes it upon himself to find out who wanted Gilda dead.

Not surprisingly, several people had grudges against the gorgeous star, a poor girl who rose from dust-bowl America to become America's sweetheart. Buck's sentimental search involves flashbacks to her life, as well as to those of her four closest fans and friends. Even without the convincing tone that Reed's firsthand knowledge of his subject brings to Personal Effects, it would be a gripping story.

It begins at Gilda's funeral, on an unbearably beautiful and sunny southern California day. But it gets under way only when Reed takes the reader back to 1956, to the night when plump, neglected May Fischoff, Gilda's godchild and daughter of her agent, brings her two boarding-school roommates to her 16th-birthday dinner in New York.

May and her friends, the beautiful Devon and the sensual Inez, have just met handsome, talented King Godwin. All three women fall in love with him -- and with Gilda and her lifestyle -- that night at ''21.'' And all their lives are changed forever as a complex, confusing series of love affairs begins. The stage is now set for the often-raunchy, always-racy drama that results in Gilda's death nearly 25 years later.

Well past 40, that killer cut-off age for actresses in earlier times, Gilda contents herself with ever smaller roles and her secret affair with cowboy actor Patrick Wainwright, whose wife is institutionalized. Gilda wears her famous, keynote string of pearls in her fabulous Beverly Hills mansion, ''The Pearls,'' and nurtures the loves and careers of May and her friends.

They need her help, one and all. After years of feeling inadequate, May finds her forte in her father's business and, within a few short years, has become the hottest agent in Hollywood. But it's many more years before poor, overweight May finds love and the strength of character to become a thin, happy person.

Meanwhile, Gilda's longtime friend, playwright Avery Calder, has written a play for King, and an acting career that began with appearances in brief, and very blue, movies sizzles on Broadway.

A classic triangle -- King loves Devon, who loves King but won't admit it because her friend Inez got him first -- becomes a miserable trap when Inez and King marry for all the wrong reasons. Devon then devotes herself first to the wrong man and then to her successful career as an actress. Again, years of intrigue and heartache go by before ancient wrongs are righted in the unexpected conclusion of the glitzy murder mystery.

All of Personal Effect's gossipy, well-developed subplots keep the reader avidly turning pages. Reed's occasionally lurid writing style and his thinly veiled characterizations make the pulp even more tasty.

Just who did he use as the model for Calder? The slim playwright drinks heavily and speaks in a pronounced Southern accent, so Tennessee Williams springs to mind. But Calder refers to Williams as a fellow playwright, and so another writer -- Truman Capote -- becomes a possibility.

Devon appears to share a lot with Jane Fonda -- political activism, a relationship with an unprincipled Frenchman. But there are enough differences to keep Devon from being a Fonda clone. The reader is just as tempted to draw connections between well-known Hollywood figures and other characters, such as the often-drugged and drunken Inez and Gilda herself.

Who are they all? Clearly, they are figures in a flashy, trashy, fun book. But they also are characters that were formed in the imagination of a writer who has been in Hollywood and New York for years, a man who knows people like this. Until now, Reed has had to stick to the facts in his writing. With Personal Effects, he can bend them to suit his fiction.